The Young Ones

Ask us who our biggest influences are, and we’ll likely include The Young Ones near the top of the list, along with the Marx Brothers, Laurel & Hardy, Abbott & Costello, Rush, etc.

We often have to explain who The Young Ones are—the show didn’t run here in Canada until the 1990’s, long after they’d left the air in the U.K., and only on MuchMusic, Canada’s music video channel, at weird hours. The show centred on four college roommates (a revolutionary poet, a punk, a hippie, and a con artist) who, for me, personified the punk aspects of the new wave of British comedy in the late 70’s and early 80’s.

For more information about the show and its place in the history of comedy, check out this Wikipedia article.

I once worked with a real-life anarchist, and he was the one who recommended The Young Ones to me. I bought a VHS tape of the first 3 or 4 episodes, and I loved it. I eventually got all four tapes to complete the collection.

So why The Young Ones?

First, the show is very funny. I still laugh after many repeated viewings. Like all great comedy, it’s not predictable, and the inherent friction between the four main characters drives the show and the comedy. The Young Ones was my first forays into the 80’s new wave of British comedy, so it was as refreshing to me as Monty Python’s Flying Circus was when as a kid I saw the reruns on PBS.

Second, for a TV show, there was a lot of physical comedy. TV relies heavily on the verbal branch of comedy, so I’m always pleased when I see good physical comedy on a TV show (Three’s Company, for instance, is one old show I’ve rediscovered as a great source of slapstick—John Ritter was one of the greats). In its day, the usual grim types criticized The Young Ones for the cartoonish violence, as was Rik Mayall and Ade Edmundson’s earlier work with as the Dangerous Brothers. But the violence is so over the top that a small child can tell that it wasn’t real or to be emulated. Rick embeds a pick ax in Vyvyan’s skull, yet Vyvyan survives. Vyvyan is the most violent, frequently using his trusty cricket bat to restore or destroy order, but he resorts to using frying pans and even a window to punish Neil, the hippie, for being himself. The Young Ones were so physical that there were a lot of master shots and medium shots to capture the action, and very few closeups as you find with most verbal comedy. As a result, the show often feels like a filmed stage play rather than a sitcom.

Third, the structure of the episodes was disjoined and surreal. The A-plot revolved around that week’s adventure with the four main characters, but it the writers weren’t afraid to make the plot somewhat non-linear, such as “Bambi” where the boys conduct a mission to the laundromat, then hop on a train to be on a gameshow. The writers also interrupted frequently with cutaways and brief b-plots. The diversions varied, ranging from live action scenes to the use of puppets (including Vyvyan’s pet hamster Special Patrol Group as well as skating vegetables, a shark, filmmaking flies, and cannibalistic rats). The live action scenes usually segued between scenes of the main plot and had nothing to do with the rest of the show. My favourite is the Narnia parody in “Flood.” Alexei Sayle would also appear, as their landlord Jerzy Balowski or one of Balowski’s relatives, and do a standup bit, sing a song about his Doc Martins (“Oil”), or even become part of the A-plot. The structure reflects how they wrote the scripts: Ben Elton would take the material Rik Mayall and Lise Mayer had written together and incorporate it into the material he’d written, making for a melding of styles, plots, and ideas. This was no American sitcom with a strong A-plot supported by a comic-relief B-plot.

The Young Ones was a big influence on our first video effort, Babysitters. We wrote the script separately—Mullet was two time zones away that summer—so we unknowingly emulated the way the writers worked on the show.

The Young Ones’ spirited anarchy puts it in the same part of town as the Marx Brothers. They attack the status quo with a glee and energy that draws the audience in—you find yourself rooting for them. It’s classic outsider humour—us versus them—and we identify with the outsiders in this case. The four leads are all poor (except maybe Mike who seems to be running some sort of underworld empire at times), and they end the series as homeless bank robbers on the run. They follow the tradition of the Marx Brothers, who frequently played penniless immigrants who conned their way into the halls of the wealthy.

Even when they are shown amongst their fellow students, the Young Ones maintain their outsider status. The party they host in “Interesting” reveals Rick to be awkward in a social situation. Later, Rick is mocked by a bomb-plotting anarchist after he discovers Rick is just a posturing rebel. Vyvyan’s friends are violent punks, the extreme outsiders, yet he admits he’d like to join the police force. Neil’s hippy friends seem the most like him, but in another episode, “Cash,” he becomes a police officer and arrests them at another party. Mike is the only one to not have outside friends shown in the episodes, but he seems to be the most connected of the group (has employees running a roller disco, got Bambi a TV commercial job, and is blackmailing the dean).

The Young Ones has a strong political streak, with frequent references to Margaret Thatcher’s government. Being Canadian, I can easily substitute “Thatcher” for “Mulroney,” and I immediately remember a time when a conservative government polarized the country during the economic and political turmoil as well as the Cold War rumblings of the 1980’s. The show contains the uncertainty and pessimism of the early 80’s quite well.

When The Young Ones first aired in 1982, the top sitcoms here in North America were Family Ties and Cheers, alongside existing shows like MASH, Buffalo Bill, and Webster.
When the second series of The Young Ones ran in 1984, Who’s the Boss, AfterMASH, and Night Court were starting out here. None of these shows were anything like The Young Ones, so it’s little wonder that the show didn’t air here until long after—and on specialty cable channels. Fox apparently made a pilot for an adaptation of the show with only Nigel Planer crossing the Atlantic, but the network decided not to make it a series.

Next time, a rambling look at another Mayall/Edmondson collaboration, Bottom.